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This tutorial is intended to show you How to Use Linkedin to add your email contacts to build a Linkedin network which reflects your real life network.

Adding your contact address book from your email program you use regularly such as Outlook, Mac address book, palm computer etc is a quick 5 step process.

1. Once you are logged into your LinkedIn Profile page, click on the green Add connections menu item from the top of any page.

2. Toward the bottom of the left hand section of Invite People to Connect there is a text link, Import your desktop email contacts », click this.

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3.In the box on the left of the screen, click on the Browse button and locate the CSV, TXT or VCF file which contains the contacts you exported from your email program. (Step by step instructions to export a CSV or VCF file from Outlook, ACT!, Mac OS X Address Book or Palm Desktop can be found here: http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=pop_ex_upload_contacts)

4. Click on Upload File, you will then be presented with a list of your email contacts from your desktop software, those who already have profiles on Linkedin will have a small blue in logo to the right of their name and be at the top of the list. People from your contact list who’s emails are not registered on Linkedin yet can be sent email invitations too.

5. Tick or untick people from the list to be sent invitations to connect, you can add a personal note to the invitation to coonect if you like, then cick on Send Invitations button.

So now you know how to add email contacts from your usual email program to your Linkedin profile. Please feel free to contact us directly if you require assistance with this task, or leave a comment below.

Why add connections to your LinkedIn profile? LinkedIn is an easy and free way to build your network. For business people, word of mouth promotion from past colleagues and customers can lead to further opportunities. If you aren’t interested in promoting a business, you can stay in touch with past workmates and friends, and see what they are up to in their professional activities and more.

LinkedIn offers this advice at http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=pop%2Fpop_more_five_reasons

What can your LinkedIn Network do for you?

1. Get introduced to the people you need
When you need to reach a professional, LinkedIn will tell you who can introduce you to the person you need.
2. Find professionals your friends can vouch for
Don’t just search the web for people. Search the people your friends know and can recommend.
3. Keep up with friends and colleagues
LinkedIn makes it easy to hear news about their careers, projects and professional lives.
4. Don’t miss professional opportunities
With LinkedIn, you hear about opportunities in your network, even if your friends don’t tell you about them.
5. Build your relationships
When a connection asks you to make an introduction, you build that relationship.

There are many ways you can build your network, here are a few simple ones to ensure your LinkedIn profile matches your real world network.

Importing Contacts from Webmail

If you use a webmail service such as Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL you can simply enter your login details on that service on the linkedin home page at http://www.linkedin.com/home. LinkedIn will present you with your email contact list from the webmail service and you can select which contacts to add to your LinkedIn network. You can add a personal note to the invitation, then click on the Send Invitations.

Importing Desktop Email Contacts

If you use a PC or Mac based email or address book application to store your email contacts, then they can be uploaded once they have been exported from your dekstop application to CSV or vCard format (read detailed upload instructions from LinkedIn here ) . These won’t be automatically added, you will be presented with a list of people already on LinkedIn, and those not yet on LinkedIn, and you can select which ones you wish to invite to connect.

Connecting with Past & Current Colleagues

While setting up your LinkedIn profile, you will have entered current & former workplaces, and possibly educational institutions. You can use LinkedIn to connect and re-connect with former workmates.

(A) Click on the Add Connections link at the very top of the LinkedIn screen, then click on (B) Colleagues

You will be presented with a list of the organisations you entered into your LinkedIn profile, click on the button for each one, and a list of colleagues from that position will be presented. Tick each of the colleagues you would like to add to your network, add a personal note if you wish, then click on the Send Invitations button.

Hopefully that provides enough information to get you started with setting up your LinkedIn Profile, the next article in our How to Use LinkedIn series will cover Getting Recommendations on LinkedIn. If you require further information or assistance, please leave a comment or contact us directly.

You can also connect with Karen Marree of Cairns Computer Help on LinkedIn by clicking here.

Don’t forget, you can use this graphic in documents, on T-Shirts, or anywhere you can think up!

Basically, a list of words from your site is weighted against each other, and larger fonts are used to identify the highest frequency words. Free blog graphics like a word cloud can boost your business by:

• Giving you a better idea of what your readers are interested in reading. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)
• Enabling you to help your readers to navigate your site more easily. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)
• Promoting your site as a fresh and innovative online business.
• Making your site more attractive and interesting.
• Letting your site stand out from competitors.
• Enhancing the Search Engine Optimisation of your page. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)
• Pulling traffic to your site. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)

Wordle enables you to create beautiful free blog graphics. Fonts, layouts and even colour combinations can be played with. This allows customisation of a unique word cloud the theme of your site, or for your topic needs.

With Wordle, a free keyword cloud can be made into a variety of images that can then be uploaded to your site, printed or even shared with friends in the Wordle Gallery. The site is a dream to navigate and provides a flexible tool for ramping up the “stickyness” of your site.

Want to create your own? Here’s how…

1. Point your favourite internet browser to http://www.wordle.net. The homepage is pretty straightforward; the first paragraph gives you a bit of information about Wordle.


Wordle Home Screen

2. Click Create your own~ to add the content for your free blog graphics.

You are given three options for selecting your “bunch of text”. Cut-and-paste content into the box provided at the top, or enter the URL of a site or feed, or enter the user name for a del.cio.us members tags to be visualised.



Wordle Enter Text Screen

As an example, I have used the first option to paste the content for this article on creating a free graphics word cloud.



An example of Wordle using this article

3. I then click Go, and am taken to another window where my content now jumps from the page! You better view your bright savy creation by clicking on the Open Window tab at bottom left.


The final result presented by Wordle

The Language tab at top left allows me to; make all my words upper or lower case; change languages; remove common words and to see the frequency count for each individual word. The Font tab allows a wide selection of funky and classic style choices. A Layout tab provides options to play with the shape of your cloud. And the Color tab provides preset colour combinations as well as allowing customisation of your colour palette.

The Edit tab at far top left allows you Un-do and Re-do tasks. A Randomisation tab at bottom centre lets you jumble the words according to the laws of chance.

4. Finally, when you are happy with your fabulous creation, you can push Print (tab is bottom left) or Save to the Public Gallery, the tab on the bottom right.

Don’t forget to have a look at the Wordle Gallery for more ideas on how to design your free graphics word cloud. There is also a link on the homepage to a Forum for more info or to swap ideas.

A free, easy, innovative and fun tool for free website graphics. Enjoy!

Note: you will need Java to run the software, the plug-in can be downloaded free from http://www.java.com. To get your free website graphics into a format which you can reuse later, follow instructions at http://take-a-screenshot.org/ on how to take a screenshot and save it as a graphic.

With over 20 years experience in business and technology we can help you save money, grow your business and work smarter to achieve more. If you would like further information, then please feel free to explore the Cairns Business Help website or contact us directly.

One of the most cost effective and targetted ways to reach customers who are interested in your product is by sending them an email straight to their in box. You can have an email sign up box added yo uour website, and also collect email addresses at seminars, product demonstrations, or by collecting a business card when you are out and about.

These customers and potential customers are already interested enough in your product or service to provide their email address to you, so they are more qualified than readers of an ad in a print magazine, and therefore more likely to convert into real sales.

An email newsletter or distributiuon should have valuable content, to interest your readers and entice them to visit your site and purchase products or services. You don’t want to send out ’spammy’ communications of little value or readers will remove themself from the email list, so consider your audience when designing the content, frequency and look of your email communications.

Other uses for email lists, are as a series of informative articles, or autoresponders which send information out on a pre-planned basis automatically. This can save a lot of time and effort on a business owners behalf while keeping the customer engaged. Keeping your business in the mind of the customer and providing informative and useful content will keep them coming back to you for more!

We use and recommend the Aweber Email software system as it is easy to build in to websites, and to use to add email addresses collected in real life meetings. It uses a double opt-in feature, which means the customer must click a confirmation email before they are added to the email list. Customers can also unsubscribe from the email list at any time, so you are NEVER spamming.

Aweber also provides excellent statistics so you can trrack how many people are clicking through to your website based on your mail out efforts.

If you would like further information, please add a comment below or feel free to contact us directly.

If you are not using your favourite RSS Reader (Click here for some info about What is RSS?) to keep track of your project activities, you may find the new Daily Digest email useful. This email is sent once a day and has a summary of to-do items or milestones which were added or completed on your project in the previous 24 hours. If there is no activity you will not receive the email.

Daily Digest Email Example

To turn on the email for your project, sign in to the Project Tracking system using the login & password previously emailed to you, then click on the overview tab at the top of the page. Toward the upper right of the screen you will see the link “Turn on email updates“, you will then see a confirmation screen where you click on the OK button at the bottom.

You can easily unsubscribe to the email by repeating the steps above and clicking on unsubscribe.

Hopefully, you enjoy this new feature in the Online Project Tracking System and find it useful, if you have any further querues please leave a comment below or contact Cairns Business Help directly. If you haven’t used the Online Project Tracking System for a while you may find this Overview information helpful at http://cairnscomputerhelp.com/basecamp-introduction-online-project-collaboration/

The web host stores not only your images, words and web pages of your website, but they also store your emails. As your business grows these can become critical to your business success.

There are many types of web hosting services available, from Free Hosting to Dedicated Hosting (where you lease a computer for your exclusive use) . It is very important to choose a reliable hosting service with a good reputation from existing users. You do not want your website disappearing completely, or occasionally. Customers and potential customers quickly lose confidence if a website disappears unexpectedly.

Free Hosting is not usually adequate for a small business website, as these services are supported by advertisements on your website which are decided by the hosting company. This doesn’t give the best impression to visitors, and may distract them to go visit other websites instead of staying at your own site. Also, free hosting solutions may not give you the control over your website design which a small business requires. At the other end of the spectrum, dedicated hosting is not required by startup websites unless they have very high end technical or traffic requirements. Shared Hosting is a happy medium where several websites share the same web server. Although you do need to be careful your web host is not overselling the space, causing all of the website to be very slow as the computer is overloaded.

At Cairns Business Help, we use and recommend Crucial Paradigm Shared Web Hosting, as they have a solid reputation, at a good price and are available by phone within Australia. We prefer web hosting which includes the CPANEL and Fantastico products as this makes many tasks easier, and therefore cheaper. Crucial Paradigm is very competitive and flexible, annual and monthly payment options are available as well as many plans from beginner level to much higher which can grow as your business requirements grow.

If you would like to research other options than Crucial Paradigm, there are many web host review sites such as Web Hosting Directory, Web Hosting Geeks, CNET Reviews, and many more which can be found my putting “web hosting reviews” into Google or your favourite Search Engine. Also, phone them and find out what their Customer Service is like before spending any money with them. When evaluating, look at cost of Linux hosting plans on a monthly basis, reputation from existing customers, uptime guarantees, backups and ease of contact. If your web host fails, and your website stops working you need to be able to contact them by phone, email and preferably some alternate means.

Please note that this is a VERY simplified introduction to web hosting, intended so that people new to having their own website can understand the concepts. If you require more detailed info, or anything described in more technical comments, please feel free to leave a comment below or contact Cairns Business Help directly.

If it is a purely personal website such as a blog of your life, then you can confidently use your existing personal email address.

For a business website, we recommend setting up separate email addresses for business correspondence such as info@example.com for a number of reasons:

• It is simple to setup and use, and included in the pricing of most website hosting packages
  

  

• If you envisage growing your business and taking on staff to assist with email correspondence, you probably won’t want them accessing
  your personal emails
• A business email account which is tied to your website domain name such as info@example.com shows a direct association with the website name (Gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail etc are very good but they can be made by anyone not associated with the domain name)
• There is flexibility to set up as many email addresses as you like, you can make a small business appear larger, with departmental em
  ails such as sales@example.com, accounts@example.com etc and use your regular email program to access and reply to all of them

Choosing Email Addresses

Depending on the type and size of your business, there are a few different ways you can set up your email addresses. Keep in mind that you can have virtually unlimited email addresses of any name which you choose. Email addresses can also be forwarded to another email address.

Role Based

These are emails like sales@example.com, info@example.com and are useful if more than one person may be answering emails. For example, if Bob & Mary time-share a job which involves answering sales enquiries each may answer emails on different days of the week so it would be better if they both look at the sales@example.com email box. If there were separate bob@example.com and mary@example.com email boxes then enquiries may go unanswered for days if they didn’t check each other’s email boxes. Also, if Bob were to leave the company, many people would still be sending email to his address unless an email forwarder was put in place.

Personal

These are emails like bob@example.com and mary@example.com, they can be very useful in some circumstances. If a business is strongly tied to services that only Bob or Mary provide and people need to feel they are in direct contact then these would be more suitable. Some examples may be personal counseling, general practitioners. If you are planning on selling the business in the future then these may not be best for the longer term.

Other notes

It is a good idea to set up a ‘spam trap’ email, during the course of your online website business you will inevitable be joining online services which expose your email address to people seeking email addresses to spam. Something like web@example.com can be useful to use for this, to keep spam segmented into a different email box.

Summary

If you are planning to grow your business to have other staff checking emails, set up separate email addresses. Generally, ‘role based’ email addresses are good unless there is a perceived need by the customer to be in close personal contact with an individual. Or you can have a combination of role based and personal email addresses.

For larger projects with a few different people involved, tasks can be delegated to other people who can login and update their progress. In addition to to-do lists, Basecamp offers message boards, writeboards, time tracking and file sharing (although all these functions are not required for all projects). Basecamp sends email messages to notify people of anything requiring their attention.

Cairns Business Help uses Basecamp for Website Development and more complex multi-step projects. If you are a customer and start receiving emails about tasks, chances are they come from Basecamp. While Basecamp is quite intuitive to use, here are some notes which may simplify using the online tools available.

When Cairns Business Help sets up a project for you, you will receive an invitation email with username and password which are used to ensure you are the one who controls access to your project information. Save this info for later reference.

When a task is assigned to you, you will receive an email with a link which you can click on to be taken to the online project management system. Once you have completed the task mark it completed by putting a tick in the box to the left of the task. To see this in more detail, here is a video you can watch.

If your peoject is using on File Sharing, Message Boards or the Project Overview Screen you may find the additional videos at the Basecamp Tutorial Videos page useful.

If you have any queries about using Basecamp, please leave a comment below, or contact Karen directly.

Website or Domain names which end in .au are an excellent idea for Australian Registered businesses who are targetting customers within Australia, as your potential customers and readers will readily identify you as Australian. However, there are some issues to be aware of when choosing a website name ending in .au

There are rules for the registration of these domain names and they are overseen by The Australian Domain Name Administrator .auda

For registration of websites which end in .com.au it is very important to be aware that there are eligibility criteria. If you do register one of these domains without having eligibility, it can be taken away and given to it’s rightful owner. This may not happen every time, however be aware of this risk when registering your domain.

An excerpt of eligibility for .com.au from the Policy Page at .auda (http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2008-05/) is quoted below

1. To be eligible for a domain name in the com.au 2LD, registrants must be:

a) an Australian registered company; or
b) trading under a registered business name in any Australian State or Territory; or
c) an Australian partnership or sole trader; or
d) a foreign company licensed to trade in Australia; or
e) an owner of an Australian Registered Trade Mark; or
f) an applicant for an Australian Registered Trade Mark; or
g) an association incorporated in any Australian State or Territory; or
h) an Australian commercial statutory body.

2. Domain names in the com.au 2LD must be:

a) an exact match, abbreviation or acronym of the registrant’s name or trademark; or
b) otherwise closely and substantially connected to the registrant.

This article only discusses websites ending in .com.au, please refer to the .auda Policy Page for the rules on .asn.au, .id.au, .net.au and .org.au

Domain or website names which end in .com, .net, .info etc have no such restrictions, so they may be a better choice for some Australian businesses.

If you would like more information on choosing a Domain or Website Name, please feel free to contact us directly, or leave a comment below.